Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), American painter, photographer, printmaker, and set designer, who played an important role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, he studied art in Paris and at several schools in the United States, including Black Mountain College, where he studied under Josef Albers.

Among Rauschenberg’s early works were boxes containing blueprints, paintings in black and white, and objects. During the early 1950s he produced collage paintings in which freely brushed Expressionist canvases were overlaid with fragments of textile, photographs, and torn newspaper cuttings. In 1955 he made his first “combines”, three-dimensional assemblages in which paintings were combined with found images, such as photographs, and objects of popular culture—traffic signs, light bulbs, Coke bottles, radios—to create ironic or ridiculous effects. The best known of these, Monogram (1955-1959, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), features a stuffed goat with a tyre around its middle. These hybrid works, emphasizing mass-produced objects, had a strong influence on the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

After 1962, Rauschenberg experimented with silk-screen printing—first in black and white, later in colour—in which repetition of imagery played a strong role. During the 1960s he also designed sets and costumes for the ballet company of Merce Cunningham, and in 1966 was a founder of EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), an organization founded to bring artists and engineers together. Much of his work during the 1970s and 1980s was devoted to collages, mixed-media assemblages, lithographs, and other forms of the graphic arts, including photography. Rauschenberg Photographs appeared in 1981. From 1985 to 1990, ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange), an exhibition of his works that he organized, was shown in a succession of locations around the world; and in 1997 a major retrospective of his work was held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, before it went on show elsewhere in the United States and Europe the following year. In 1993 Rauschenberg was the recipient of America’s National Medal of Arts award. He died on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida.